Highlights in child mental health research: November 2023

This month’s highlights include:

• Assessing the impact of blue and green spaces on the mental health of children with disability

This scoping review identified relationships between exposure to blue and green spaces and mental health among children with disabilities. Results broadly showed that access to green spaces was associated with better mental health outcomes (relating to emotional, cognitive, or behavioural outcomes) for children with disabilities. Overall, the effect of green spaces on mental health was influenced by sociodemographic (e.g., gender, household income), personal/parental health (e.g., parental mental health history), and environmental/contextual (e.g., air pollution) factors, however there was not a consistent effect between studies.

• Early parenting interventions to prevent internalising problems in children and adolescents
  

This systematic literature review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) examined the effect of parenting interventions (interventions with a central focus on parenting abilities or behaviours) on internalising problems in young children. Parenting interventions that focused on the parent-child relationship were effective in reducing internalising and externalising problems compared to treatment as usual. Evidence suggested that being placed on a waitlist increased internalising problems. However, there was little supporting evidence that early parenting interventions had lasting beneficial effects (after 3 or more years) on reducing internalising problems in children.

• Emotional behavioural outcomes of children with unilateral and mild hearing loss

This study examined the relationship between hearing loss and emotional, behavioural and health related quality-of-life (HRQoL) and parental distress outcomes. Data from 339 children (aged 5-12 years) with hearing loss (HL) enrolled in the Victorian Childhood Hearing Longitudinal Databank was analysed.  The study indicated that around 1 in 5 children with different types of hearing loss had emotional and behavioural difficulties; most commonly hyperactivity and poor social behaviours. The prevalence of HRQoL, and parental distress scores, were higher in children with unilateral/mild HL or moderate to profound HL  than children without hearing loss.

• Mothers’ experiences of emotional abuse and its associations with child development

This study sought to understand how children’s exposure to their mother’s experience of emotional intimate partner violence (IPV) when the child was 3-5 years old is linked to child developmental outcomes at age 5. Data was analysed from 194 Australian mothers who were recruited based on their experience of adversity during pregnancy. The authors found that 57% of mothers in the study had experienced emotional IPV at least once when the child was 3-5 years old. Children exposed to emotional IPV had poorer outcomes at 5 years than children who were not exposed. The differences were most evident in the internalising and externalising symptoms.

• Economic evaluations of digital health interventions for children and adolescents

This systematic review of economic evaluations of digital health interventions (DHI) for children and adolescents (1-18 years) aimed to understand the cost-effectiveness of DHIs. 82% of the included studies concluded that DHIs are cost-effective or cost saving in comparison to the non-digital standard of care. Cost-effectiveness was mostly dependent on implementation costs, supervision/training of health care professionals, intervention effect size, and the potential for the intervention to be scaled up.